Like many innovators the founders of Sweetgreen were simply trying to solve a problem and along the way managed to build a business around the solution The problem Sweetgreens founders had according to Co-Founder Jonathan Neman was very basic they were hungry And they found that it was difficult to really fill that need on a Georgetown students budget They could eat cheap food that tasted good and served up fast but was terribly bad for them or they could eat healthy food that also tasted good but generally speaking accessing that food was going to be slow and expensive The idea was creating a restaurant that or a place to eat that made you feel excited to eat it good while youre eating it good right after and good many years after Newen told Recode The idea however has expanded pretty notably since then Sweetgreen now employs about 3 500 people has 90 stores nationwide and has seen about a million people download its mobile app About half of the orders Sweetgreens fills per day are made via mobile And according to Neman Sweetgreen is thinking past its earliest days when the problem they were solving was lunch We see this as building the food platform he said A restaurant creates content so our salads are our hits If you just have your restaurant itself you own your platform you go direct to consumer And that direct-to-consumer relationship is critical to the brands growth he said which means its founders are hesitant to partner with either tech firms or the aggregators on expansions like delivery because they dont want to risk that direct consumer relationship The world according to Neman has shifted to a place where the digital disintermediation of the customer is becoming the norm The Uber Eats and various aggregators of the world of the world that create the platform for the food creators content Our goal is to be a content creator and a food platform So a full vertically integrated food system from supply chain production content creation and ordering The restaurants Sweetgreen rolls out he said come in different shapes and sizes but have some commonality The preparation process is highly regimented across the chain and all of the ingredients are made onsite and or prepped fresh daily That basic blocking and tackling is critical Neman notes because at the end of the day content is king in restaurants as it is everywhere else and if the food doesnt taste good and consistently live up to expectations people arent going to eat in the restaurants From there he said Sweetgreen has been highly focused on layering digital innovations throughout its core offering to create an all-over brand experience Delivery on demand is a standard Sweetgreen offering and it accepts orders in a wide variety of ways including voice ordering text ordering and Slack ordering We want to take these trends weve seen in eCommerce and apply it to food Neman said Sweetgreen is also taking an expansive approach to technology on the backend particularly when it comes to its fresh food supply chain The firm is currently investing in blockchain technology to better shore up tracking of ingredients shipped to its store locations Starting in January it will require some of its vegetable producers to use blockchain to record different pieces of information such as when and where their items were planted We are trying to build a system of full traceability to know which farm food comes from and when it is picked Nicolas Jammet Sweetgreens cofounder and chief concept officer told Business Insider For us that idea of traceability is the biggest protection against food poisoning The idea of the custom and fully transparent supply chain Neman noted is also critical to the Sweetgreen brand because of how much focus each of its locations puts on localizing dishes Though there are national products available at Sweetgreen locations the firm mostly builds its supply chain city by city as it expands as its contracts for food are not with distributors but with growers directly We establish relationships with them the farmers and we actually build our menus based off of the supply he said And that means our food will be different in different parts of the country and different parts of the world eventually and will be different at different times of the year We celebrate that We celebrate the fact that food should taste different at different places We reject this homogenous food system that you created this burger and it should be the same everywhere exactly LATEST INSIGHTS Our data and analytics team has developed a number of creative methodologies and frameworks that measure and benchmark the innovation thats reshaping the payments and commerce ecosystem Check out the latest PYMNTS report on how QSRs are doing when it comes to innovation